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It Sure Doesn't Sound Like Jonah Lehrer Is Donating That $20K Speaking Fee To Charity

Jonah Lehrer’s appearance at a Knight Foundation event Tuesday was supposed to be the first step in a rehabilitation culminating in his return to the welcoming arms of the journalism profession. It didn’t quite work out that way.

Instead, Lehrer’s weird, slyly self-exculpatory mea culpa has resulted mostly in a fresh round of opprobrium, both for him and for the Knight Foundation, which not only gave him a platform for his pitch but gave him $20,000 for making it.

Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibargüen told the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple he was unbothered by the many critics who thought a non-profit dedicated to promoting journalism ought to be finding better uses for its limited resources than enabling the comeback tour of a fabulist and plagiarist.

But Lehrer’s decision to take the money was just as questionable, assuming he’s serious about returning to journalism’s good graces. Any crisis PR consultant worth her retainer would certainly advise him to decline the fee and the terrible optics that go along with it. That Lehrer doesn’t seem to have received any such advice baffles Amy Wallace of Los Angeles magazine, who wonders,

Is he just not availing himself of the wisdom of the people who care about him — and I’m not just talking about his family, but about all those talented journalists he worked with at Wired and The New Yorker and countless other places during all those years that he was hailed as the second coming of Malcolm Gladwell? Or are they just not answering his calls? Because I’m convinced that if he’d gotten any one of them on the phone before he chose this way to begin his redemption, that person would have told him to choose another route.

A man who truly wants to atone for his sins does not need to be paid five-figures to do so.

Spying the chance for a win-win, I’ve been banging the drum for Lehrer to quiet his detractors and bank some goodwill by donating that $20,000 to charity. I can understand that turning down cash in hand might be hard for a man whose future career prospects are uncertain. None of his last three books has sold more than 1,000 copies in 2013. Meanwhile, his publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, declines to say whether it required him to give back any of the advance it paid him for “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” which it recalled, saying, “Our financial arrangements with authors are confidential.”

But considering the millions Lehrer was earning in book advances and speaking fees pre-downfall, anything that threatens to derail his return to grace is potentially far more expensive. Even absent those considerations, it wouldn’t be a bad move. Knight Foundation spokesman says it’s “not uncommon for our speakers” to donate their honorariums.

But Lehrer failed to reply to several emails asking him his intentions. Finally, I managed to get him on the phone this afternoon. “I’m not interested in commenting,” he told me. Could he at least say whether he planned to keep the money? “I read your article. I have nothing to say to you,” he said, before hanging up.

Not much of an interview, to be sure. But I’m putting it on the record just in case Lehrer decides once again to pretend reporters are writing about him without giving him a chance to comment.

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He probably just can’t afford to part with $20,000 with his future career in such uncertainty, but also can’t bring himself to actually plead poverty.Especially if he really upped his life-style and living expenses in the wake of his Pre-Plagiarism Success, which seems certain considering that he bought the historic Shulman House in California for $2.25 million.

I think there’s certainly a tidy income to be made from the “I was a bad boy. Don’t be like me” speaking circuit (and I can see Lance Armstrong taking that path in the future), but for Lehrer, this was just an exercise in bad judgment – too soon, not contrite enough, wrong venue – bad optics all around.